GET OUT: US politics November 2020

yes but why

Why anything?

Who knows these things.

probably designed to give the new president time to ride a horse to DC

Approximately

save a horse, ride an Amtrak

'Why anything?' < new life description, plz

federalism and the Electoral College, I think - gotta have time to certify elections, have the EC meet, have Congress accept the electors, new President mosey on down to DC

all via horseback

I was listening to something podcastwise over the last week talking about the last lame duck session for a March inauguration. Where the outgoing president is being really condescending and trying to lecture the incoming one including trying to get him to rethink policies he's now famous for whereas I'm not sure the outgoing is much respected.
& this dragging on for 4 months instead of 2. Prompting the duration to be looked into and legislated against.

Hoover and FDR did not make for a smooth transition.

Hoover tried to get FDR to agree publicly about a trade deal or foreign debt refinancing, FDR told him to stick it and relations did not improve from there.

Indeed. While I understand FDR's political reasons for refusing the Hoover administration's entreaties -- and we know now to what degree Hoover's Treasury people collaborated with FDR's incoming people through Inauguration Day -- I find it hard reading when I learn how the country cratered from November through March.

This could be the wildest ride of all though - who knows what Trump might do. He's already had to be talked down from bombing Iran.

by John Bolton

sleeve wrote this on thread Trump, July 2017: Tweet more on board I Love Everything on Jul 28, 2017

can I get off this ride?

No one gets out alive IIRC

Follow up to my question ("so are the Republicans just going to do this every election from now on?"), does that mean the Democrats are also going to have to do this shit from now on? The 2000 election, for example, could have *easily* gone to Gore if they went full dick-mode, like these assholes are doing.

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, November 17, 2020 7:59 PM (thirty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes, the sooner they realize this, the better. There are no norms anymore.

These are things i don't want to become normalized

― Lover of Nixon (or LON for short) (Neanderthal), Tuesday, November 17, 2020 8:03 PM (thirty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Then get ready for Democrats to lose way more than they win.

Well that didn’t take long

BREAKING: The Wayne County Board of Canvassers has just unanimously voted to certify the results of the election & called on Michigan SOS Jocelyn Benson to conduct an audit of the unexplained precincts in Wayne County that did not match.

— Adam Brewster (@adam_brew) November 18, 2020

maybe it's a dumb idea to be a local official and draw that kind of national attention

we are so lucky all these guys are the biggest dumbfucks in history

Now we are going to hear forever about how Joe Biden's Antifa death squad intimidated the Board of Canvassers into caving.

As any specific “evidence” of fraud crumbles away I’ve noticed the narrative shifting to a more 9/11 truther style where it’s “too many coincidences” “too many unexplained phenomena” “what are the odds that x y z could happen “ etc

I mean, tbqfh, 2020 has been quite a year.

xp exactly, "we'll never really know what happened" ad nauseum

79 million people conspired against the incumbent, that’s what happened

probably designed to give the new president time to ride a horse to DC

― howls of non-specificity (sleeve), Tuesday, November 17, 2020 8:12 PM

I wouldn't be surprised if that factored into it. I just learned recently that the general election day (first Tuesday after the first November Monday) was selected as to not interfere with a) church and b) farming/harvesting. Being a Tuesday, it would give people a chance to travel from their remote properties into whatever city the polling location was and time to travel back home before markets and shit opened on the weekends.

Another member of the Board of Canvassers has thoughts...

Hey guys,

Please Watch @NedStaebler — a Wayne County Board Member of Canvassers stuff in a locker @HartmannDude and @monicaspalmer — the two members that refused to certify the ballots for the county...pic.twitter.com/iGl3LSf3Sw

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) November 18, 2020

dayum

Ah yes, a secret plan

One thing I keep hearing from Rudy people tonight: they know they can't catch up. What they want -- in MI, PA, NV, other states -- is for the vote to *not* be certified. Their end game: try to force it to the House. Giuliani talking about this privately. https://t.co/HTTuXbZbao

— Robert Costa (@costareports) November 18, 2020

That was fucken righteous

xpost

I just hope no one on the left takes this hapless and doomed effort lightly. It's a look ahead. Next election will have better lawyers with better cases, and probably some carefully ginned up scandals to make it look like the vote really can't be trusted.

xpost holy shit, he dropped Bull Connor and George Wallace in there. jugular.

More breaking news from Grassley:

Windsor Heights Dairy Queen is good place for u kno what

— ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) November 3, 2014

it's def a pretext for GOP state legislatures to create some truly psychopathic voting restrictions in the next four years

I just hope no one on the left takes this hapless and doomed effort lightly. It's a look ahead. Next election will have better lawyers with better cases, and probably some carefully ginned up scandals to make it look like the vote really can't be trusted.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Tuesday, November 17, 2020 10:30 PM bookmarkflaglink

I mean, they already pulled off a swindle in 2000, they have the taste for it. one advantage in our favor is that a large portion of this so-called "legal challenge" having the legs it does in the public sphere (in lieu of any actual success) is because the candidate in question is basically a demagogue. Republican voters usually coalesce behind their Presidential candidate, who usually emerges as the slight favorite from a packed field. they don't usually, like, LOVE their candidate to the alarming degree Trump voters love Trump.

but....I agree that this is why it's important to win these legal battles, to try and set legal precedent to squash any similar uprisings in the future.

Same energyhttps://t.co/yIjHgBVzV5

— Matthew Lane (@MattCameronLane) November 18, 2020

So it appears public shaming worked in Wayne County tonight?

Yeah, they reached a fig-leaf compromise that there can still be an audit.

i enjoyed this maybe u will too

https://defector.com/these-people-are-morons/

some excerpts for non-subscribers

What (the record of history) should be is that a society fitfully engaged in the long-term pursuit of equity and, at the very least, a certain disappointing boardroom diversity elected and then re-elected a black president. Then, in a spasm of reactionary grievance, a coalition of white bigots set out on a mission not only to restore an avatar of white manhood to the White House, but to prove to itself that it could elect the single most venal, most worthless, most flagrantly unqualified shit-for-brains failson imaginable to the highest possible office in the land. It needed to prove that it could not only elect him but then sneeringly, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, insist not only on his personal greatness, but that he was succeeding and winning at all times.
This outcome would only deliver the desired fix if he were just an absolute shit-pile, if the only credible explanation for his election were that the arbitrary will of reactionary white people, alone, in the total absence of any justifying qualities of his person or his record, had selected him for no good reason at all. If he could be, in every conceivable way, the opposite of what a standard-issue milquetoast liberal meritocrat would look for in a president, and in no way anything else. He would have to be a fucking moron, is the thing, and surrounded by fucking morons. That way his ascendancy to the White House could not be attributed to him, but rather and entirely to the cross-section of white-identity voters who’d organized for the purpose of demonstrating their supremacy to themselves.

...When it came time to execute precisely the invalidation of the electoral process for which the right had spent months preparing, it amounted to Trump’s campaign manager, son-in-law, and various inept lawyers crying that it’s not faaaaaair to say that somebody else has more votes than Donald Trump.

I have been having a series of “Oh, right, these people are morons” realizations since this past Tuesday. Or a more acute series of them, amid a longer one stretching back to 2016. These are, after all, the people whose early attempts at legislating via executive order collapsed when it became clear that their Dark Lord of Strategy, Steve Bannon, had no idea how to write a legally upstanding executive order; whose attempts at repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, a key campaign promise for literally every Republican, collapsed after a little over two weeks of negotiating with a then-friendly House and Senate; who airballed point-blank layups on infrastructure and pandemic relief; who are now living through the second COVID-19 outbreak inside the White House just in the past six weeks. They’re malign, sure, but they are not special in their malignity. They are special in their incompetence.

With each passing day of this lockjam I become more convinced that this ends with Trump's brain splattered all over the Oval Office.

I'm kind of allergic to the tone of that article but this is a good insight:

It’s important to note that all of this is happening within systems designed by and for men broadly like these. Their ineptitude and amateurism is astounding, even relative to their dopey inbred class.

That said, they ARE good at enriching themselves, despite what the article says. Trump may be 'broke' but he has access to unimaginable luxury. Etc. This has been discussed before.

xp if you mean by suicide, then it's very unlikely - narcissists don't kill themselves.

Good morning!

non consensual assisted suicide , preferably a pact with Mitch

Biden nationwide lead now 3.73%; seems likely to pass Obama's margin of victory over Romney (3.86%) in the next day or two, as the CA/NJ/NY counts continue.

Irrelevant, I know; if this meant anything, the campaigns would be entirely different, leading to different outcomes, but still. Ultimately, the only states where Trump gained may turn out to be NY and FL (there are a handful of narrow underperformances elsewhere by Biden wrt Clinton '16, but they may disappear). How nice for him.

Serious iNquiries only done by one half of the team taht does Opening Arguments did a comparison to the last 2 election cyucle results earlier and was saying thgat the big factor this year was teh major amount of Republican turn out. Which meant that some seats taht had gone from being comfortable GOP and had turned blue partially due to lack of GOP turnout competition in 2018 went back to GOP.
Which does show that things can be swung at l;east and hope they are going to head back that way.
~Am worried about Texas gerrymandering meaning that getting this close may not be rerpeated but did hear taht Austin is now lot more blue than GOP thought it would be, sounded like taht ahd some sevcere border tinkering too but was overtaken by a blue swing anyway.

Not quite getting this with georgia, if it was won for the Dems now does taht remain and the seantors potentialy change or is the whole state up for grabs in the run offs. Kemp was the senator and therefore not the head of state running the election in the state this time, yeah? Did he get to interfere much?

Irrelevant, I know; if this meant anything, the campaigns would be entirely different, leading to different outcomes, but still. Ultimately, the only states where Trump gained may turn out to be NY and FL (there are a handful of narrow underperformances elsewhere by Biden wrt Clinton '16, but they may disappear). How nice for him.

― Michael Jones, Wednesday, November 18, 2020 6:21 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

trump overall got 10 million more votes than he did in 2016 though, showing his support grew in real terms. it's just that the opposition to him grew by an even larger margin.

Some fun with GA spreadsheets (not entirely clear if the audit corrections are being folded into these documents on the GA-SoS site):
Trump won Nov 3: 60-38 (20% of votes cast)
Trump lost absentee: 34-65 (27% of votes cast)
Trump won early: 53-46 (53% of votes cast)
Trump lost provisional: 35-63 (<0.3% of votes cast)

the u.s. voter age population also grew as a whole